I grew up in a social setting such that people once they earn a bad name, it was very difficult for them to recover and be back in full swing in the society. They have to rebuild their reputation either in a new place or the same place. Why did people try to associate themselves to a society?; because living together was easy and people helped each other a lot. If one falls sick, there were people who helped the family of the sick member to help them get back upto speed.

The labour market also did the same, governments across the globe came up with a lot of guidelines and laws to employ people such a way that there was social security in the form of sick time, paid leaves, bonuses, retirement funds, insurance and gratuities. We were able to advance as a society very well with these elaborate social structures, though someone can earn a lot of money doing small gigs many people avoided for the predictable life of an established company.

The lure of quick money is always there, especially when people are young the cash in hand always triumphs the long term survivability. People don’t see far ahead and not many are aware of saving for the rainy days when they are strong, healthy and ignorant. This makes a lot of people take up gigs to survive, a gig means – ‘a job, especially one that is temporary or that has an uncertain future’. Gigs offer a lot of money in hand for a given skill and experience to compensate for the uncertainty in the future.

The money component alone lures a lot of people into the gig economy where people with less or no skills can immediately get going and even get paid within a day of commencing work. The trouble with gig economy is

1. There is no social net in it, sort of a medieval system where the strongest and fittest survive. If people fall sick or meet with an accident they lose all the savings, they earn no money during sick time and end up with a perpetual high cost debt.
2. You can get away doing bad work or behaviour, and if things go bad you can leave a system and join something else fresh. If you did bad job in a food delivery system, you can leave and make money driving cars for sometime. Though the same is possible in full time employment, the scale at which this can happen is big in the gig economy and you can change identities easily or mask your past performance easily

It is hard to address point number 1, the gig economy is new and it is giving jobs to a lot of people and many of them get a lot of money which they think is disposable and end up spending it.

The second point is bad from a consumer point of view, if there is no repeat business from a customer there is no incentive to give good product or service. Uber does it through its rating system, but what if that person decides to create a new profile altogether after a messed up profile or switch gigs to something else.

In the short run it seems a lot of people will have new jobs and people in college can do part time work for delivery services, but in the long run it will tune people to settle for a life where they think that they can earn a lot than full time employment but companies will do all sorts of tactics like ‘bait and switch’ which has happened to cab drivers in India and keep them hooked on to the system even when it turns damaging for them.

There will be a point in time that governments have to intervene to make sure exploitation of its citizens don’t take place else our society will slowly regress into a medieval feudal system.

Phone calls used to be so expensive while I was growing up and the cost increased exponentially as the distances increased. Often I had to plan what to talk to people when making a call to keep it short; as my entire pocket money for the month can be used up if I spoke to my parents for 30 minutes during peak hours. Communication was expensive so that people planned carefully on how to talk, when to talk and how much to talk. Some people even chose to be contactable only in person and mails by avoiding a telephone line to save big on telephone costs.

What happens when something that was expensive becomes cheap, do we spend that savings elsewhere? This is where Jevons Paradox occurs. When communication became cheaper we stared overdoing it. What used to be a routine 3 minute call to a friend once in a while is now well over 30 minutes. We started paying more by time spent rather than money spent. It is a systems problem, the inefficiency just moves to another place.

This is applicable for anything, food was expensive and refrigerating food was even more expensive so we had invented a lot of ways to carefully store, cook right amounts, recycle leftovers into new dishes and also find ways to preserve through fermentation, pickling etc. My grandmother almost never generated trash or food waste to be dumped, all the edible portions were eaten and organic waste like peels went to plants which again gave back food. We are talking about this cycle as a new way of simple life and as if no one did this before.

This is an important factor in web development in particular and software development overall. Developers are given a lot more freehand to use resources at will to deliver the experience for the user. This has resulted in loading a ~500 KB homepage of which most of the code that is downloaded and processed is not directly useful or seen by the user (A good portion would be to track what a user is doing!). In a constrained environment, elegant solutions appear; in an abundant environment everything is bloated and there is no judicious use. A single webpage can potentially crash a browser or slow down the entire system.

How can this be solved? In many other industries the problem of plenty is not there for users, there are always constraints to work with to get efficient and elegant solutions. We need something like ‘Muntzing‘ for software industry; instead of needlessly hammering through generic all in all bloated solutions we can cut out the fat and concentrate only on core work.